30/10/2013
Josh Berson is an anthropologist of language, technology, and the cognitive sciences with a background in software design. His work asks how technology—the extension of our motor, sensory, and symbolic faculties beyond the modulus of discrimination given by our bodies—enters into our experience of self-awareness.
How does technical prosthesis alter the flow of matter and information across the interface between self and non-self: between body and world, human and other living thing, living thing and machine, subject and institution, us and them? How does it change the quality of our unadorned interface in its haptic, vocal, auditory, ocular, vestibular, proprioceptive, and linguistic dimensions?
What does it mean to participate in a community of entangled social presences, acknowledging that we share our environment not just with other living things but with a proliferating array of partly autonomous assemblages of matter and information?
If we think of the total ensemble of mediators and mediating processes—body, dyad, built agglomeration, the planetary anthrome in toto—as present not by virtue of its status as an extension of animal nervous systems but by virtue of a quality of self-production that is larger than us, then it becomes possible to ask what is shared among the phenomena of resonance and perturbance characteristic of social life in its many moods, from body schema to face-to-face conversation to global circulatory rhythms of goods, people, knowledge, and capital.